Orange crates sealed with bumper stickers float, but not for long. So John Pollack discovered when he built his first boat at age six. Far from being discouraged, the young boy decided that someday, he’d build a boat from something that couldn’t sink: corks. Over the next 25 years, Pollack pursued other dreams, working as a White House speechwriter and a foreign correspondent in Spain, but he never stopped saving corks. His new book, Cork Boat, is a lively, memorable account of the attempt to make his dream a reality.

The Cork Boat project began in earnest in 1999. "I wanted to start the new century with a big project, and the time seemed ripe to launch the boat," Pollack tells BookPage over the phone from his New York City apartment. He’d found a business partner in Garth Goldstein, an architectural student whose design expertise would be crucial to the boat’s success. Realizing they’d never save enough corks on their own, Pollack and Goldstein printed out flyers and handed them out to local restaurants and bars, asking them to save their corks for the project. Pollack was met with one of two reactions: immediate excitement and support, or a blank stare. Neither fazed him. "If you’re building a cork boat, you can’t take yourself too seriously, because it’s such a goofy project. And I think that if you can laugh at yourself, other people are willing to laugh with you."

To build the boat, Pollack and Goldstein designed a honeycomb "cell" of corks rubber-banded together in the shape of a hexagon. These cells would be bound together to form logs, which in turn would construct the Viking-like ship. To help band the corks together—first at Pollack’s kitchen table, then in the garage of Goldstein’s rented house, soon dubbed the Mount Pleasant Boat Works—Pollack used his way with words to recruit friends and neighbors, holding boat-building parties late into the night. He solicited help from the California-based Cork Supply, USA, which generously donated many of their test corks to help Pollack and Goldstein collect the 165,000 corks that they would need to complete the project. Still, building the boat was much more complicated than Pollack had imagined.

"The most unexpected aspect of the whole project was how hard it was. There were several times where I thought, this is impossible. And there were several times when I felt like quitting. My mom was instrumental in saying, ‘you can’t quit, not now if you do you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.’ And mom was right."

The hard work of so many people paid off when, in April of 2002, Cork Supply called with a proposal: would Pollack and Goldstein be willing to come to Portugal in June and sail the boat down the Douro River? It wasn’t the wine country route that Pollack had originally envisioned, but he enthusiastically agreed. He and Goldstein spent the next two months in furious production, putting finishing touches on the boat and correcting problems they’d noticed during the boat’s first launch on the Potomac the previous October. But once again, the difference between dreams and reality gave the team a wake-up call. The trip, far from the idyll Pollack had imagined, "ended up being 17 days of hard rowing," he admits ruefully. "But the struggle made it all the more worthwhile; if it had been easy, it wouldn’t have been so meaningful."

Pollack’s evocative description of the ups and downs of his remarkable journey creates an unusual memoir of one man’s struggle to live a childhood dream. He hopes it will inspire others to do the same. "One of the reasons I wrote Cork Boat was because I wanted to story to live. Years from now, someone’s going to be looking for a book to read, and they’ll see Cork Boat, pull it off the shelf and read the story, and the journey will continue."

African orphan transforms the life of a foreign correspondent Neely Tucker, a foreign correspondent for The Detroit Free Press and Knight Ridder, was transferred in 1997 from his post as a roving reporter in Eastern Europe to Zimbabwe. When he wasn’t traveling on assignment in war-ravaged sub-Saharan Africa, Tucker and his wife, Vita, volunteered at an orphanage in the capital city of Harare.

The orphanage, probably the best in the country, was woefully underfunded. A shocking number of infants fell sick and died. Tucker and his wife began to care for one of the most gravely ill of these children, an infant girl named Chipo (which means "gift" to the Shona-speaking majority of Zimbabweans) who had been abandoned in a field just moments after she was born. Very quickly, the childless couple decided to adopt Chipo.

Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir is Tucker’s completely absorbing account of the couple’s efforts to overcome both a maddening social service bureaucracy and a deep cultural prejudice against foreign adoptions and gain Chipo as their daughter. Good writer that he is, Tucker also tells a story of larger and deeper human transformations.

"To say that this is an adoption book or a book about Africa is like saying The English Patient is about Egypt and World War II," Tucker says during a call to his desk at The Washington Post, where he has been a staff writer since returning from Zimbabwe in 2000. "Egypt and the war frame the experiences of the characters in that novel, just as the adoption and Africa framed my experiences. But what I hope people will understand this book to be about is a time in your life when you put everything on the table, when you just risk everything."

One of the most important things Tucker risked for Chipo and Vita was his career as a journalist. Being a reporter, Tucker says, "was not just a job I showed up to do. It was my life." And Tucker was not merely a journalist, but one of those rare journalists who sought the toughest assignments, who "had the working idea that there was a higher form of truth to be found in the world’s most impoverished and violent places, a rough-hewn honesty that could not be found elsewhere." As a result, some of the most horrifying and exalted moments in Love in the Driest Season are Tucker’s brief narratives about people and events he witnessed in war zones in Eastern Europe and Africa.

The decision to adopt Chipo complicated Tucker’s dedication to his work as a foreign correspondent. "I just didn’t think it was the responsible thing to do to spend my time that way anymore. The third time you’re in Bujumbura staying in the same crappy hotel doing another story that will run on page A15 while your only child in this life learns to smile or walk or has her first day in school, you start asking yourself why you’re doing this."

At the same time, the political situation in Zimbabwe was becoming darker. According to Tucker, Zimbabwe has long been considered "Africa 101. That is, it was as easy as Africa gets. The country worked pretty well, the literacy rate was pretty high, the hospitals were OK, you could go to the grocery store, pay with your credit card and get just about everything off the shelf there that you can get here." Beneath the social veneer, however, unnoticed by the casual tourist, AIDS was decimating extended families, which more or less functioned as the country’s social support network; families, hospitals and orphanages were overwhelmed. New and popular political parties challenged the corrupt regime of Robert Mugabe and Mugabe reacted by going after the messengers. Foreign journalists were intimidated. Tucker’s phone was tapped and his family was threatened. Not wanting to jeopardize the adoption, Tucker began to avoid reporting about Zimbabwe. "I think I’m harsher on myself than anybody at Knight Ridder would be," he says, "but from my standpoint, my career went down the tubes. Not in something I did but in something I didn’t do. I didn’t write untrue stories, but I just didn’t do my job." Tucker eventually took a leave of absence to complete the adoption.

The adoption transformed Tucker, but that is not the only transformation in this story. Tucker was born in the poorest county in Mississippi and as a child attended an all-white private academy. When, as a reporter, he was hired by the Free Press and moved to Detroit, he met and eventually married Vita, an African-American widow who remembered Mississippi from childhood trips as a place so "bad that as a black person from Detroit, you were actually grateful to get to Alabama." Neither family was thrilled with the marriage, but Tucker’s was the more resistant. "I told Vita when we got married that I never expected to be reunited with my family, and Vita said, well, you might just be surprised,’ " Tucker remembers. Because of her religious conviction, his mother eventually got a passport and flew for 14 hours to Poland, where the couple was living while Tucker covered Eastern Europe, and apologized to Vita. His father changed with the arrival of Chipo.

"My father had been abandoned by his old man when he was two days old, and he just identified immediately with Chipo," Tucker says. "He’s not a touchy-feely guy. He doesn’t talk about his emotions. He was a guy who had been abandoned by his father and had mentioned it only once to my mother. And he just took to Chipo."

Tucker writes in Love in the Driest Season that "race has been the defining issue of my life." In conversation, he says, "It would be silly not to be optimistic. From when and where I was raised and from when and where Vita was raised, it’s much better today, it’s insanely better, it’s ridiculously better."

And Chipo? She’s better too. "She knows absolutely everything about where she came from," Tucker says. "She’ll tell you she’s from Zimbabwe. She’ll tell you she’s a pretty girl from Africa. That’s how she’ll introduce herself." And that’s a happy ending to a pretty amazing story.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

The Sparks brothers recount a round-the-world adventure This experience started the way any Nicholas Sparks novel might a Notre Dame alumni brochure arrived at the author's North Carolina home advertising a three-week travel tour by private jet to see the world's most exotic sights: Machu Picchu in Peru, the stone heads of Easter Island, Ayers Rock in Australia, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, India's famed Taj Mahal, the rock cathedrals of Ethiopia, the Hypogeum in Malta and the northern lights of Tromso, Norway.

Sparks, an admitted Type A personality, was deep into the writing of Nights in Rodanthe in the spring of 2002 amid the merry daily cacophony of three sons, twin daughters, barking dogs and parcel deliveries. Drop it all for a trip around the world? Sure, he thought, maybe someday.

But he couldn't shake the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. When his wife Cathy pragmatically begged off but encouraged him to enlist his brother Micah instead, the stage was set for Three Weeks with My Brother, a poignant, funny and ultimately life-affirming family memoir/travelogue that only the Sparks brothers could have written.

Fans of Nicholas Sparks' novels The Notebook, Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, A Bend in the Road may be surprised to learn that the author's life has known the same emotional turmoil he brings so vividly to life in his fiction. By their mid-30s, the Sparks brothers had lost their mother at 47 to a freak horse-riding accident, their kid sister Dana to brain cancer and their father to a traffic accident. They were the lone surviving members of a family that had managed to rise from Nebraska poverty to middle-class academia in Sacramento, California, and produce two sons who would prosper beyond their wildest expectations: Nicholas sold The Notebook for $1 million weeks before his 30th birthday; Micah parlayed a real estate career into several successful businesses.

It was time to put it all into perspective, to revisit the best and worst times of a past shared as best pals, track teammates, devil's advocates, constant supporters, and above all, brothers. It was time to celebrate their survival.

BookPage caught up with the Sparks brothers in a conference call; Nicholas spoke from North Carolina, Micah from his home in northern California.

Which came first, the trip or the idea for a book? "We kind of had an idea that we would write something together, so we both took notes the whole way through the trip," says Nicholas. "I mean, you're on an airplane for six and seven hours at a stretch, there are only so many bad movies you can watch." "We knew we would relate the story of our family and the brothers," Micah adds. "And of course we're on this magnificent trip around the world, so after we got back, we started working on how to weave the two stories together. That structure was the hardest thing about the book." Being suddenly alone together, away from their wives and families, put both brothers in a reflective mood.

"On Easter Island, we were on our way to see our first Moai (giant statue) and there were all these horses just running free and we both immediately thought about mom, it just hits you," says Nicholas. "She loved horses. She could spot a horse flying down the highway." But it didn't take long for their natural Wally-and-Beav playfulness to surface. In Three Weeks, the two revisit their favorite childhood pranks, from denuding a whole neighborhood of Christmas lights to blowing up mailboxes with supercharged fireworks to one particularly narrow brush with disaster in an abortive William Tell scenario.

On the trip, their inner kids grew restless and a bit punchy over all the antiquities. "It's a jar and a bowl!" says Nicholas. "We saw lots of jars and bowls." It was Micah who failed the Ayers Rock appreciation test: "Yeah, it's a big rock in the middle of Australia; they took us out there numerous times to look at the big rock before sunrise, after sunrise, in 105-degree heat with flies. In the end, it's one big rock in the middle of the desert." Their best moments were spent off the beaten path, in pubs and chatting with everyday people: cab drivers, waitresses, bellhops and the like. In Cambodia, where the devastation wrought by the Khmer Rouge has given rise to a young but vigorously upbeat population, they had an encounter they will never forget.

"We went through a high school it is now the Holocaust museum where they tortured people, and our tour guide had gone to that high school; his brother had become a Khmer Rouge, so they were on opposite sides," says Micah. "And for him to go back to his high school and see bloodstains on the floor and the spikes and the shackles . . . he had his whole family wiped out by the Khmer Rouge! But they still smile and have a sense of humor." The poverty of India still haunts them: "It blew me away to learn that India, which is just a little bigger than Texas, has one billion, 250 million people, five times our population, just smashed into this country with no resources," says Micah.

Once home, the brothers recreated the gut-wrenching family memories by exchanging faxes between coasts. Nicholas wrote Three Weeks from his own point of view, but most of the memories were shared and hard won. "There were scenes that were very hard for us to write," says Nicholas. "These are not memories we want to remember." For those, Nicholas and Micah can turn to their last night in Norway, arms intertwined in a local pub: "They had this song where the Norwegians would sing these long verses and then the Americans would shout out the chorus I can't tell you what it was, something in Norwegian and we would boom it out at the top of our lungs, and they would all crack up. So at the end they said, Hey, do you know what you were saying?' And we said no, and they said, It means, you're beautiful and I'm warm and naked.'" Micah laughs. "They have long nights in Norway and they enjoy them." Jay MacDonald belts a mean karaoke version of "Born on the Bayou."

The author of the bestsellers All I Need To Know I Learned from My Cat and My Dog's the World's Best Dog, Suzy Becker was proceeding with her career as a writer-illustrator when she was diagnosed in 1999 with a tumor that would require brain surgery. In a new illustrated memoir, I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse? Becker gives a poignant and funny account of her journey to recovery. Known for her starkly original perspective, Becker shares the story behind the book in the "interview" that follows.

Behind the Book: This new book is such a departure from your previous work did you ever consider calling it All I Need to Know I Learned from My CAT-scan? [We laugh.] Seriously, what inspired you to write it?

Me: I think it was the fourth or fifth day after the operation. I was laid up at home, recuperating from a bunionectomy, not officially back to work and the idea came to me. Kind of one of those eureka moments. I picked up the phone, called my editor. And I remember her reaction exactly: Bunion surgery?! No one's going to want to read a book about bunion surgery! I didn't agree, I still don't. I think people will read about anything if it's good or interesting or funny enough, but . . . a week later, there was a videotape in my mailbox. She had focus-grouped my book idea. The people in the focus group all wanted to read about brain surgery.

BTB: You got the idea from a focus group?

Me: Not really. But none of this is real—I'm making the whole interview up, as in there is no Behind the Book behind Behind the Book.

BTB: I'll go along. What inspired you to write the book, really?

Me: Not the obvious answer. . . . I never felt inspired to write this book, like I did with the cat or dog book; I felt compelled. At the time (May 1999), I was planning to write and illustrate an altogether different memoir, a book about my decision whether or not to have a baby. I had applied for a fellowship at Harvard to work on it in the fall. Three days after I found out I got the fellowship, I had the grand mal seizure that led to the diagnosis of the mass on my left parietal lobe and then the brain surgery. If everything had gone according to plan, I think I still would have written the other book. Maybe included a chapter on the brain surgery. But, the surgery, an awake craniotomy, which carried some risk to my upper-right-side mobility (my drawing hand) ended up unexpectedly messing up my language abilities: speech, reading and writing. No one knew how long the problems would last. Twenty-four hours stretched into 18 months. I went to Harvard in the fall anyway (two months after my surgery), commuting in to Boston for speech therapy, basically keeping to myself, and my notebook. I made notes about everything.

My handwriting and sentence formation were frighteningly crude right after the surgery (the actual notes are in the book), but by the fall, my notebook had become a source of comfort, a confidante. Forget about speech problems just saying the words "brain surgery" sucks the air out of a room. I talked to the notebook.

Eventually, I had to start working on a book. A colloquium (a word I was never able to say until after I left Harvard) presentation is the only requirement of the fellowship year. Mine was scheduled for March. The baby decision book was out of the question I was on birth-defect causing anti-seizure medication up through November. When I finally sat down to write, I was forced to write what I knew, and there was really only one topic I knew anything about.

BTB: You mentioned that people don't really want to talk about the subject. Were you worried that they wouldn't want to read about it?

Me: Sure. And I worried that there wasn't a book in it. Every day of the fellowship year, I wondered whether I would have thought any of it was funny if things had turned out worse. There was a Fellow across the hall whose sister had died of brain cancer the summer I had my surgery. Writing the book it took me three years was my recovery. I am grateful to Harvard and to Peter Workman for publishing it.

BTB: What about the baby decision book?

Me: What about the bunion surgery book?

I had forgotten what a rushing torrent of words spills from Charles Siebert’s mouth when his passions are up. I had forgotten how casually he drops arresting metaphors into normal conversation. I had forgotten how humorously, obsessively he tracks a thought through the circuitous digressions of life’s hum and drum to arrive at an unexpected observation. I had forgotten just how frighteningly articulate he can be.

It’s been – what? – more than 20 years since Chuck and I last ran into each other on New York’s Upper West Side, several years after we had graduated from college. Memories fade. In the long in-between, Siebert has produced a steady stream of poems, essays and articles that have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine. He had a role in John Sayles’ movie Eight Men Out. In late 1984, he moved to Brooklyn, where every writer in the world now seems to reside, and has lived in the same building ever since. He shares his sixth-floor apartment’s "glorious view of Manhattan" with his wife, novelist Bex Brian. He has published two well-regarded books, an "autobiography" of his Jack Russell Terrier, Angus, and a remarkable memoir/prose rhapsody called Wickerby. Despite writing frequently about medical research, especially on matters related to the heart, he still doesn’t have health insurance.

Siebert relates most of this during the early, catch-me-up part of our conversation about his superb new book A Man After His Own Heart. It’s gratifying how easily we settle into familiar conversation. But it’s only when Siebert refers to youth as an unselfconscious time when "you’re in the porch-swing of your own bones, you’re settled into yourself and are just staring out at the world with a kind of awe," that I think, oh now this, this is the wordsmithing poet I palled around with on the Binghamton campus.

But of course that is not true. Siebert is a far different and far better writer than I knew or could even have imagined 25 years ago. In Wickerby and even more so in A Man After His Own Heart, Siebert has forged a unique sort of nonfiction work, something he doesn’t quite know how to characterize: "It’s so many different things at once – memoir, prose poem, rhapsody, I don’t know," he says. But no matter what you ultimately call this particular type of literary work, it informs and it sings, and if the talent gods are just, A Man After His Own Heart will be Siebert’s breakthrough book.

Viewed from a wide angle, A Man After His Own Heart is an account of the night in December 1998 when Siebert participated in a "heart harvest," traveling to New Jersey with a team of surgeons to remove the heart from the body of a recently deceased young woman, and then returning to New York to deliver the heart to a waiting transplant recipient. From this angle you read about: the technicalities of heart transplants; new scientific discoveries about the biology of the heart and the genetic disorders that influence heart disease; the emotional and biological interplay of the brain and the heart; the fascinating history of diminutive, feisty William Harvey’s trip to Padua in the 16th century to view the dissection of human corpses (which would lead to the discovery of the body’s "ever recurring circulation of the blood").

You read, too, about: the patients who wait desperately for donor hearts; the distressing experiences of people who have lived with mechanical hearts; and of the political-sociological hierarchy of a heart harvest and the drama that hierarchy engenders. All of which Siebert portrays magnificently.

To present the book’s unbelievably varied subjects as this sort of laundry list, however, is to miss the beauty and drive of Siebert’s narrative approach. "I go off on all these tangents," he says. "I have the most indulgent, digressive of first-person voices." Which is the closest Charles Siebert may ever come to understatement. In fact, Siebert’s mind wanders like a relaxed fisherman, following the lure of his thoughts and meditations out among the currents, pools and eddies of fact and metaphor until the anxious reader may want to tap him gently on the shoulder and remind him that there is, after all, a heart harvest going on and he might want to attend to it. But such digressions brim with insight and provocation and are narrated in language that is simply marvelous.

One of Siebert’s purposes in writing this book is to make visible what he calls in conversation "these vast invisible inscapes of ourselves." Hence his fascination with such recent science as the discovery that "humans borrow the same muscle fiber mechanism that allows a fly’s wing to beat at 150 beats a second. It’s as if Nature is this great artificer that finds it needs to make a heart and suddenly remembers the fly wing design and pulls it off the shelf to serve the heart design. That kind of thing blows my mind."

Another of Siebert’s overriding purposes is to explore the heart as metaphor, as the traditional location of human feeling. Thus Siebert writes movingly and with surprising directness about his relationship with his father, who suffered from heart disease throughout Siebert’s adolescence and early adulthood, and who may have passed on the faulty gene responsible for that disease to his son. "In the early drafts I found myself shying away from going far into my father, but then I found that once I’d opened that Pandora’s Box the only way to go was to go as far into it as possible, make a whole character of him, otherwise I’d be cheating the readers. And to my joy, people have told me the book gets stronger as it gets more personal."

Siebert doesn’t see the science of the heart and the poetics of the heart as being in conflict. Quite the contrary. "This is not a time for poets to be throwing up their hands and saying, Ahh, science has taken away all our wonder,’ " he exclaims. "There’s a tendency in human thought to dismiss ourselves from our own biology and live up in the ether that our very biology creates. What I’m saying is wait a minute, look what the new science is showing us. It is in a way bearing out all the intuitive myths of the past."

Alden Mudge, of Oakland, California, is a juror for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.

Rock ‘n’ roll bridges the generation gap Somewhere around the time his 11-year-old daughter grew bored with listening to his Beach Boys mix tapes and started worshipping Britney Spears, it dawned on Carl Lennertz that if he wanted to impart what he knew of life to his only child, he’d better do it soon. Lennertz wasn’t too sure how many actual pearls of wisdom he had to pass along when he began scratching out short, humorous essays that compare and contrast his small-town Long Island boyhood in the ’60s to his daughter’s midtown Manhattan upbringing in the ’90s. As a 20-year veteran of the New York publishing world, Lennertz knew everything about books except how to write one. For that, it took a father’s love, a dash of chutzpah and some of that old-time rock ‘n’ roll to reel in the 40 years between them.

Cursed by a Happy Childhood is Lennertz’s sweet and funny mix tape, a greatest-hits package of parental moments big and small, combined with a fond look back at his own boyhood spent happily lost in the music that changed the world.

“There was a New Yorker cartoon three weeks ago where a little girl says, gee, Mom and Dad, thank you for the happy childhood. Now I have nothing to write about,” Lennertz chuckles by phone from New York. “We have lived through 20 years of very depressing books about childhood, from Mary Karr [The Liars’ Club] to [Augusten Burroughs’] Running with Scissors. I didn’t read those, I didn’t feel that I wanted to, but that was their exorcism. I just sat down one day and started writing to my daughter and thought, geez, I have mostly only good things to talk about.” Lennertz began framing his fatherly missives on the night after George Harrison died. The soundtrack of his life was never far from his thoughts as he assiduously avoided the usual parental topics (sleepless nights, changing diapers, etc.), concentrating instead on less-plowed fields such as “home echhhhh,” getting braces and the joys of comic books. As he wrote, he found that reflecting on his childhood love of rock ‘n’ roll lifted a kind of inner velvet rope, admitting him to a vast common ground between father and daughter.

“I wanted it to be like a record album where the songs are paced: fast song, slow song. It is slightly chronological, and I tried to pace it with some serious stuff and then quickly go back to a lighter piece. Things get slightly more serious as it goes on. I start with collecting comic books and end up talking about drugs and drink.” As Cursed came together, his publisher suggested opening each chapter with an image of an actual 45 single from rock’s heyday that comments in some way on the topic that follows. “I Only Have Eyes for You” by the Flamingos ushers in the chapter on his daughter’s first glasses, “My Back Pages” by the Byrds ends the collection, and so forth. It turned out to be the book’s signature touch.

“Music was incredibly important to me back then,” Lennertz admits. “I recall sitting down with the Beatles’ White Album and I read those liner notes and looked at those pictures like they were the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Through music, Lennertz formed an instant connection with his daughter. “We went from Sesame Street to Raffi and Disney songs, and then I made a Beach Boys tape for her, and she liked that. Then some Beatles, she liked that. I played some Santana. Rascals; that was good. Then she kind of moved off of that at about 10 to 11, and found her own, and that was Britney Spears. I have no problem with pop music; I went through the Archies and the Cowsills. I get it. So Britney Spears I sort of liked,” he says.

“But my first glimpse of a dark storm cloud was a group called Good Charlotte. Those lyrics are depressing. And I thought, OK. I had the whole debate. Do I want her to listen to this? And I said, you know what? I listened to Procol Harum and Led Zeppelin and I turned out pretty well.” Viewing the publishing process from an author’s point of view was both enlightening and nerve-wracking. Though he’d written more than 500 subtitles during his years as a Random House marketing vice president, he only submitted two for his own book, and both were rejected. He estimates he rewrote more than half of the essays, killed some entirely and substituted new ones under deadline. The five-month wait between final draft and publication proved excruciating.

“There’s that freak-out period where you come to realize that people are going to actually read this. I flipped. I had a meltdown one week when I got my copy of the editing notes because I couldn’t read the symbols. I had this moment of, oh my God, I hate this book! I finally said, Carl, relax. This is a sweet little book. Read through it, change what you can, and let it go.” Upbeat and life-affirming, Cursed contains no reference to either the Kennedy assassination or 9/11, the single biggest traumas of each generation. “I didn’t want to preach and I didn’t want to go on at length,” Lennertz says. “I had a mental list of things not to write about.” In the end, writing Cursed bore out the truth of the famous Nietzsche quote, “Child is father to the man.” (“That’s also the title of the first Blood, Sweat and Tears album,” Lennertz quickly notes, “one of the great albums of all time.”) “I was kind of doing a report card on myself as a father, as well as passing along what little knowledge I had. We’re an overly introspective generation, I think to a fault. All along, I was thinking, how have I done, how have I done? I guess I kind of wrote it to say, hey, you’re far from perfect but you did OK, and at least you’re listening. In the end, I ended up learning from her.” Writer Jay MacDonald is still enjoying his happy childhood.

Augusten Burroughs didn’t set out to become the new bad boy of American letters when he careened onto the bestseller lists two years ago with Running with Scissors, his hilarious, horrifying account of the world’s worst childhood: it just happened, like much of his highly unconventional life to date. Abandoned by his dysfunctional parents to the "care" of his mother’s lunatic shrink, his Valium-gobbling patients and the pedophile next door, Burroughs left formal education in the fourth grade, overcame childhood sexual abuse, earned his GED at 17 ("It was like, Spell cat,’ " he recalls) and by 19 was a New York advertising writer responsible for $200 million accounts. Unusual events seem to form a static-like cling to Burroughs, leaving him to process them the best way he knows how by writing about them.

There are dark passages indeed to Burroughs’ modern-day Horatio Alger tale as depicted in Running and its 12-step sequel, Dry. America may not have been quite prepared for his depiction of addiction, obsession, AIDS and graphic gay sex, but we soldier through the grim stuff for the same reason Burroughs did: in the belief that love and happiness lie just around the next ordeal. He has earned his place alongside such singular dysfunctional hall of famers as Oscar Levant (The Memoirs of an Amnesiac), Frederick Exley (A Fan’s Notes) and Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries).

So it came as a relief to hear Burroughs’ upbeat tone as he spoke by cell phone from the newly paved driveway of the home he and Dennis, his partner of five years, are building in Amherst, Massachusetts, a few blocks from his brother and not far from the unsettling sites of Running with Scissors. It’s the very Beaver Cleaver moment that the articulate, engaging Burroughs has been dreaming about most of his life.

"I never had a home, never had a home with a washer and dryer, so this is a first," he says. "These are the days when I’m finding myself in grocery stores, which is something I never did, and that kind of thing fascinates me. I can’t tell you how much I love Target and Costco, that kind of culture, because it’s something I never felt a part of. I’ve always felt like a tourist because I have never fit in anywhere."

Burroughs’ new beginning is evident throughout Magical Thinking: True Stories, his first collection of funny, edgy essays drawn from a life way less than ordinary. Raise your hand if you’ve ever been cast in elementary school for a Tang commercial only to be left on the cutting-room floor, drowned a rat in your bathtub, had the roof of your mouth splayed open by a dentist on a routine visit, or had a gay fling with an undertaker in the same viewing room where Rose Kennedy’s wake took place.

What keeps us laughing and turning the pages even as we shudder at the thought of these experiences is Burroughs’ unflagging humor, relentless optimism and endearingly self-deprecating style. Witness his response when a particularly odiferous street person shows up at a book signing:

"But then, look at me. My brain is incorrectly formed, and I’m shaped like a tube. Plus, I’m an alcoholic, a survivor’ of childhood sexual abuse, was raised in a cult and have no education. So, really, if you think about it, the only thing that separates me from the guy with the stinky foot and no teeth is a book deal and some cologne."

At 40, Burroughs is free of the stampeding alcoholism that threatened to trample him (see Dry), unchained from the lucrative but unfulfilling world of advertising and involved in a relationship that evens out his eccentricities. His last bout with substances was muscle-enhancing steroids, chronicled here in a chapter called "Roid Rage," that ended with a herniated disc from weightlifting. The fact that he only chews a half a box of nicotine gum a day is almost quaint, considering.

Burroughs says he understands how readers might get the wrong idea about him.

"When people meet me, many times they’re very surprised because they expect someone who is kind of wacky with seven piercings and very hip and cool and New York City, and I’m not," he says. "I’m like the guy who prepares your taxes or a dentist. I’m very conservative and boring in a lot of ways." OK, so your accountant doesn’t regale you with tales of gay sex. But Burroughs maintains he’s not out to shock anybody; he merely presents the details of his admittedly unusual experiences to underscore the universal themes of his writing.

"I think people tend to see the bigger point, which is maybe not fitting in and feeling like you didn’t have the childhood that you expected you would have, or that you felt lonely or struggled with drugs and alcohol or just that you were able to achieve your dreams. These are the themes that I personally struggled with."

There is a sense of completion about Magical Thinking (the title is a psychological term for the belief that one exerts more influence over events than one actually has), a sweeping-up that suggests the author may be ready to move beyond his fractured past. Early next year, shooting begins on the film version of Running with Scissors, with Julianne Moore as Burroughs’ mother and Jill Clayburgh as the psychiatrist’s wife. But for Burroughs, his imperfect past will always be, in the words of Pat Conroy, "a renewable thing."

"I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes. As a child, I was never drawn toward depraved or extreme situations; I really wanted a normal little childhood. Unfortunately, that’s just not what happened. But I ended up having the ability to appreciate this strangeness I found, an ability to use it for something better."

Jay MacDonald urges all families to keep the "fun" in dysfunctional.

Ernestine Bradley is the wife of Bill Bradley, the former basketball star, U.S. senator from New Jersey and 2000 presidential aspirant. But she dwells neither on sports nor politics in The Way Home: A German Childhood, An American Life, her engaging account of growing up in wartime Germany and then flowering as an adult in America. Although her marriage to Bradley clearly put her in the company of the glamorous and mighty, she doesn’t gossip or drop names. Her focus, instead, is on coming to terms with her parents particularly her self-involved mother and finding her own way in a culture she first glimpsed through its conquering army.

Bradley came to America in 1957, when she was 21 years old and working as a stewardess for Pan American airlines. The following year, she married an American doctor and moved to Atlanta. There she gave birth to her first child, earned a doctorate in comparative literature and began her long career as a college teacher. After the marriage ended, she moved to New York, leaving her child in the custody of her former husband. In 1974, she married Bradley, who would go on to serve 18 years in the Senate. While he lived in Washington (and eventually took care of their young daughter), she continued to teach in New Jersey. Such an arrangement, she observes, was perfectly congruent with the then-prevailing feminist values to which she enthusiastically subscribed.

Speaking to BookPage from her home in New Jersey, Bradley explains why her book concentrates more on what was going on inside her mind than the minute details of what was happening around her. “I think the world always needs some interpretation,” she says, her German accent still distinct. “Otherwise we face it blindly. Without a structure, you can’t process whatever information there is.” Although she says she made some good friends in Washington during her husband’s tenure in the Senate, Bradley admits she was not drawn to the town’s social scene or political intrigues. “So many of the people you meet in Washington, particularly among the political participants, you don’t really develop friendships with. They are all purpose-based contacts, I would say.” Fully half the book is devoted to the author’s life in Germany. Her descriptions of Passau and Ingolstadt, the towns in which she grew up, are vivid and often warm, despite the deprivations she suffered. Always at the center of her recollections is her domineering mother, who was simultaneously an inspiration and a burden. Ernestine was conceived out of wedlock, but by the time she was born, her mother had made a marriage of convenience. That marriage ended eight years later when Ernestine’s real father, a German soldier, came back into the picture. It was not until her mother’s death in 2001 that Bradley seemed able to resolve their complex relationship.

“When I was a teenager the time that she influenced me most profoundly,” Bradley reflects, “I wasn’t really aware that I was being influenced heavily influenced by her. I could only read my responses . . . . [M]y actions were to get away from Ingolstadt as soon as I could. Today, in this country, [that’s] not a big deal. But at the time, which was in the late ’50s in Germany, it was a major step. I don’t know in retrospect whether it was a step of liberation or just a step to get away from this very powerful influence.” But leaving home didn’t end her mother’s influence, Bradley concedes. “I think after I came to this country, I still enacted the imprints I had received before I left. As she began to fail [physically] and I went to Germany right after the [2000] election frequently to be with her some of my thoughts began to be clearer to me. I began to understand why I had to leave, why I wanted to leave and what the cost would have been if I had stayed. Like any mother, she only wanted the best [for her children] but she always thought her way was the best.” In 1992, Bradley discovered she had breast cancer. In fighting the disease, she lost a breast. But the experience made her more resilient and philosophical. “Losing a breast is not so great an inconvenience as losing an arm or a foot,” she writes. “I am lucky.” Now retired from the faculty of Montclair State College, Bradley teaches one course a semester at the New School in New York and spends a lot more time with her husband, daughters and grandchildren. “My life,” she says with evident satisfaction, “is completely filled.” Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

On the screen, Gene Wilder is known for his comic teamings with Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor. Away from the public glare, the man with the melancholy gaze and trademark frizzy hair paints watercolors and lives in a Colonial-era house in Connecticut with his fourth wife, Karen.

How this came to be is the result of the twists, turns and ironies of his life, as detailed in his new memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art. Unfolding chronologically, in a series of vignettes, it co-stars family members, famous names, women he has loved, including his late wife Gilda Radner, and his therapist. "Writing the book was, in itself, a kind of therapy. Several years ago, a brief trip to California became a months-long visit [when his mother-in-law took ill]. I thought I'd go crazy if I didn't have something artistic to do. . . . I started writing, and whatever had built up, after, oh, Gilda, then finding my wife, Karen, and then memories from childhood . . . it just started pouring out," Wilder recalls.

No, he didn't have a ghostwriter. Speaking by phone from his home in Connecticut, he reminds us, in his soft-spoken, carefully modulated voice, that he has written "more than a half-dozen movies." No fan of tell-alls, the introspective Wilder takes his readers through his life's journey via his work, exploring the notion of fate, and how the choices we make reverberate. Consider this scenario: after auditioning six times for Jerome Robbins, Wilder was cast in the 1962 theatrical production of the Bertolt Brecht play, Mother Courage. Though he went on to realize he'd been terribly miscast, he became friendly with co-star Anne Bancroft, whose boyfriend was Mel Brooks, who told Wilder about a script he was writing which would include a role for him. Three years later, when Wilder was on Broadway, Brooks reappeared in his life to report that the deal for the film, The Producers, was at last cinched.

"Oh, my God. If it hadn't been for Mel!" says Wilder, whose performance of nebbish producer Leo Bloom led to a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. He went on to star in Brooks' nutzoid Western, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. He wouldn't have met Radner had director Sidney Poitier not suggested her as the leading lady in Stir Crazy. Wilder soon discovered that the "Saturday Night Live" star was as troubled as she was talented. "I said, at one point, we can't live together. And that's a fact," he admits. Indeed, he adds and writes, were it not for an episode involving Radner's Yorkshire Terrier, Sparkle, they might not have married at all.

Readers may find it surprising that Wilder doesn't romanticize his marriage to Radner. "Oh, you noticed, did you?" he deadpans. He depicts her as demanding, anxious to be loved, a fount of neuroses. But he also stuck by her during her bout with ovarian cancer. "I always thought she'd pull through," he recalls. After Radner's death in 1989, Wilder became the patient, successfully battling non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

He was halfway through writing his book when he realized "I was really writing a love story." But thinking back, he could never have anticipated this particular romance. It began with the movie, See No Evil, Hear No Evil. To prepare for his role, Wilder met with speech pathologist Karen Webb. Following Radner's death, the two reconnected and married. "But if I'd met Karen 20 years [earlier], it would never have worked. I wasn't ready for her and she wasn't ready for me."

In his book's preface, Wilder refers to the famed fountain outside the Plaza Hotel in New York City. To get past it, do you walk to the left or to the right? "I believe that whichever choice you make could change your life," he writes. In Kiss Me Like a Stranger, Wilder offers an unconventional but honest look back at where his own fateful choices have led.

Biographer Pat H. Broeske has covered Hollywood for several newspapers and magazines.

James Frey has never been shy about his towering literary ambition. Since he burst onto the scene in 2003 with A Million Little Pieces, the best-selling, highly charged memoir dissecting his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, Frey has ruffled feathers and raised temperatures by saying things like:

"When I decided I wanted to be a writer, I didn’t get into it to be a guy who sold 15 books and got a review in the local paper. I’m in this to be one of the great writers of my time."

What is often left out of the accounts of Frey’s supposed overreaching is what he usually says next: "I don’t say that I am one of the great writers, which I think is an important distinction. But that’s the ambition, for sure. I want to be read in 75 years."

Whether Frey’s new book, My Friend Leonard, will be read in 75 years is, of course, impossible to say. But it will certainly be read – widely read – this year. While somewhat different in tone from Pieces (there is more humor and less rage, for example) My Friend Leonard is just as compelling as the first book, with the same electrifying narrative energy, stylistic daring and atmosphere of emotional risk.

My Friend Leonard takes up about where Pieces left off. Out of recovery, Frey does a stint in jail for a past drug conviction, then sets out to rebuild his life. He is advised and assisted at critical junctures by his friend Leonard, a larger-than-life Las Vegas gangster 30 years his senior whom he met in rehab and who has decided to treat Frey like the son he never had. Leonard helps Frey financially by employing him occasionally as a bagman for some of his enterprises. He guides Frey through the purchase of his first Picasso. He uses a little unfriendly persuasion when Frey’s neighbor seems about to turn murderous after an incident between their dogs. Skeptical readers might wonder if Leonard is a sort of idealized, if hard-bitten, fairy godfather. But Frey says otherwise.

"Did the stuff in the book really happen? Yeah, it did. My girlfriend killed herself the way I wrote it. Leonard helped me the way I said he helped me, died the way he died. The events in the book are the events of my life. But that’s not to say that I didn’t pick and choose what to use and how to use it. The goal was to write a great book, to create something that somebody will feel good about having read. It’s a sort of juggling act, where I have to be true to the events and the people, but where I also know that I am writing a book and that I have to be true to what the book should be," Frey says in a gravelly voice during a telephone interview.

The 35-year-old Frey and his wife, Maya, a creative director at a New York advertising agency, had their first child, a daughter, in December and are in the midst of moving to an apartment "that is a bit more baby-friendly" in New York’s Tribeca district. Frey takes the call at the home of friends, and as he talks, he moves from room to room ahead of his friends’ noisy family life.

"One thing that’s always been important to me is that nobody who has ever been in one of my books has ever had a problem with anything I’ve written," Frey continues. "They’ve never disputed my version of events or felt offended by it, even when I didn’t write about them in a positive way. Which means something."

At the very least it means that Frey is exceptionally good at conveying the emotional truths behind the events he relates. His portrait of his friendship with Leonard is deeply resonant and offers a fuller human portrait of a gangster than you’re likely to find anywhere else.

What is most striking – and most difficult to describe – is Frey’s manner of telling his tale. Here, as in A Million Little Pieces, Frey’s style is raw, visceral and emotionally electric. Frey says that when he set out to be a writer he studied writers like Hemingway, Henry Miller and Baudelaire and noted that each had a voice, a signature style that sounded like no one else’s. He deliberately set out to develop a recognizable style all his own.

"People read my books and think because they flow very easily and very simply that it must just come out that way," Frey says. "It doesn’t. I work very hard and I’m very, very deliberate and methodical in how I work."

In fact, Frey says one of the things that sets him apart from "smarter or more naturally gifted" aspiring writers of his generation is his "ability to sit there for 10 hours and get done what I need to get done, without ever losing confidence that I can do it. And to do that day after day after day after day after day."

So it’s no real surprise to learn that since completing the manuscript of My Friend Leonard, Frey has finished the screenplay for A Million Little Pieces, which will be filmed later this year, and written the script for a TV pilot for Fox. He is currently working on a screenplay for Paramount. Earlier this year, he wrote introductions for British reissues of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.

Miller’s bold presentation of his life in his books had a powerful philosophical influence on Frey’s development as a writer, just as his friend Leonard had a powerful influence on his development as a human being. "I’ve learned a lot of things from a lot of people." Frey says. "And they all boil down to similar things: you have to be willing to hurt for what you want. You have to risk, to gain. You have to be willing to feel pain and deal with pain. You have to decide what you want out of life and be willing to pay the consequences if you want to have a great life. It’s worth it. And you’re a sucker if you don’t."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Julia Scheeres’ memoir Jesus Land is a painfully candid account of a family riddled with dysfunction. Scheeres, now 38, grew up in a strict Calvinist household in Lafayette, Indiana, the daughter of a surgeon and his Bible-thumping wife. Her parents’ missionary zeal led them to adopt two African-American boys when Julia was still a toddler. One of them, David, became Julia’s soul mate. Together, the two endured their upbringing and shared many trials, including a harrowing stay at Escuela Caribe, a Christian school in the Dominican Republic run by New Horizons Youth Ministries. Scheeres’ parents appear more interested in their own religiosity than their children’s emotional needs. Her father’s answer to discipline was bone-breaking brutality; meanwhile, her mother turned a blind eye to rampant behavioral problems, including David’s attempted suicide.

Julia’s other adopted brother, Jerome, grew up angry and hostile, and his repeated sexual abuse of Julia was additional torment in their ugly home life. Jesus Land concludes with the news that David, whose personal notebook inspired the memoir, died in a car crash in 1987. He was only 20 years old. Scheeres recently answered questions from BookPage about her wrenching personal story.

BookPage: Your portrait of Escuela Caribe is troubling, since what’s supposed to be a reaffirming place for confused teens comes off as an insensitive reform school. Do you think your parents made a mistake in sending you there? Julia Scheeres: I think it’s a mistake to send any child to Escuela Caribe. For $3,000 a month, you can ship your child to a Christian boot camp in the Dominican Republic, where she’ll receive a substandard education, learn to spout “Praise Jesus,” and be so traumatized she’ll have nightmares about it for the rest of her life. Escuela Caribe is essentially a dumping ground for the problem teens of wealthy evangelicals. Many students come from homes where they were emotionally, physically or sexually harmed, yet these issues aren’t addressed by the school. Such camps are located in foreign countries for good reason: to evade U.S. regulations governing child welfare, academic quality and housing standards. The whole point of Escuela Caribe is to break the “rebellious teenage spirit” through humiliation, intimidation and suspending simple freedoms and convert kids into Christian automatons.

BP: Frank memoirs involving family and abuse can be painful reading for all concerned. What have been the reactions of those involved in your life at that time? JS: My book is first and foremost a tribute to my brother David. I found a green notebook after his funeral in which he detailed what it was like to grow up black in a white, fundamentalist family and about our time together at Escuela Caribe. I wrote Jesus Land in an effort to preserve his memory and the memory of the life we shared together. I was the person who knew him best, and it’s my job to keep telling people about what a quirky, tragic and beautiful soul he was. The reaction of other family members and acquaintances wasn’t a consideration as I wrote Jesus Land.

BP: Of all the people in your book, your father seems the most mysterious. What was, or is now, your relationship with him? JS: My father was a ’50s-era dad, who left childcare to the wife and was largely absent due to his high-pressure work as a surgeon. But he was also pressured to be the Biblical head-of-the household disciplinarian. We didn’t talk about problems or issues in my house. You were told what to do, and you obeyed. If you broke the rules, you got spanked or whipped, in my brothers’ case. I grew up fearing and avoiding my father not a healthy situation. I no longer have contact with either of my parents, who work as full-time volunteers at a missionary compound in Orlando, Florida.

BP: Being the victim of sexual abuse usually holds lingering consequences. What has been the long-term emotional or behavioral fallout for you? JS: Where to begin? A rabid distrust of people, and all men in particular? Sexual frigidity and/or promiscuity? A tendency to depersonalize and/or revile sexual partners? I’m sure it’s all well-documented in the case studies. I think the most important step for me was meeting my husband, a man who blew away my low expectations for male behavior and companionship. I don’t think people ever fully recover from ritual abuse of any sort. I still get into funks, but have learned to better negotiate them.

BP: Despite your troubled youth, you’ve gone on to obtain a master’s degree and respect as a journalist. To what do you ascribe your perseverance? JS: I’ve always had a strong sense of self and an independent streak three miles wide. Growing up, I believed that if I could just escape the pettiness surrounding me, things would get better. And they have.

In the world of showbiz sidekicks, Ed McMahon is royalty—the most famous second banana, ever. Instantly identifiable, the man with the booming laugh and avuncular voice worked with Johnny Carson for more than four decades. The announcer for Carson’s daytime game show, “Who Do You Trust?” McMahon went on to spend 34 years opposite the late-night TV king on “The Tonight Show.” McMahon’s warmly affectionate Here’s Johnny! is his homage to their friendship.

“That was the best time of my life, the best years of my life, being with him,” says McMahon. Not that the famed pitchman is packing it in. To the contrary, McMahon, at 82, seems tireless. Speaking by phone from his Beverly Hills office, on the eve of a New York publicity tour, he relates that he and wife, Pam, are busy raising their niece (whose mother died as a result of a car accident). “We had the sweet 16 party with a hundred kids in the backyard.” With a laugh, he adds, “When you say your prayers tonight, say one for me, because I’m raising a teenager!” (The father of six also has six grandkids.)

McMahon, who penned a 1998 memoir, hopes this latest book will dispel some notions that have surfaced since Carson’s death early this year, especially the oft-heard claim that Carson was ice-water cold and aloof. “He was not cold, he was private. He was wonderful on camera, but once the cameras stopped, he returned to being a private man. Johnny used to say, ‘Ed, I’m great with 10 million, I’m lousy with 10.’” Noting that Carson didn’t intrude, didn’t force himself, McMahon explains, that was a result of his Nebraska-Midwestern ethic.

Along with sharing golden moments from “The Tonight Show,” McMahon gives peeks at those guests who caught some guff. Like the time a performing Ray Charles snapped at the house drummer, “Pick up the pace!” Johnny made him apologize, recalls McMahon. Then there was the off-putting appearance of comedian Charles Grodin. “It went a little too far because it left the audience out. Johnny was always very concerned about the audience,” McMahon says. “He didn’t want anything to be beyond their comprehension.”

A man who feels comfortable in a crowd, McMahon is a former carnival barker and boardwalk pitchman (he hawked the Morris Metric Slicer) who once went door-to-door selling pots and pans. At 17, he was working in radio and on early TV, as well as calling bingo games. World War II led to a stint in the skies as a Marine Corps aviator. Returning home to TV, McMahon was involved in 13 Philadelphia shows in a single year. That included hosting a late-night movie and playing a clown on a Saturday morning kiddie program. Then came a repeat of military life: he was recalled to service for the Korean War.

It was through a producer for popular Philly TV host Dick Clark that McMahon’s name surfaced as a possible announcer for Carson’s game show. McMahon took the train to New York, met with Carson, then headed back home. He wasn’t hopeful about the prospects; the meeting had lasted all of six minutes. When the show’s producer called, saying Carson wanted McMahon to wear suits, McMahon wondered what he was talking about. “Oh . . . didn’t they tell you? You got the job. You start next Monday.” And so began one of TV’s most durable partnerships.

Over the years, they shared drinks at Sardi’s, survived marriages and divorces (McMahon lucked out at number three) and endured painful losses. In 1995, when McMahon’s son died of stomach cancer, Carson called to express condolences, adding, “There’s not a day when you won’t think about him.” He was speaking from the heart: Carson’s photographer-son, Rick, had died in a 1991 car crash. (Carson famously wrapped one of his shows by airing his son’s photos.) As for what set Johnny apart from the rest of the chat pack, McMahon says, simply, “Class. He had class.” Not a big fan of some of today’s talk show hosts, and their sharp and piercing comedy, McMahon notes, “Johnny very seldom penetrated. It was always like a powder-puff. He still got the laughs, but he didn’t hurt.”

Audiences also related to Carson’s wide-eyed charm, as well as the easy-going camaraderie with McMahon, who says of their astounding adventure, “I always liken it to two kids, kicking a can down the street. We had a good time together, and it showed.”

Biographer Pat H. Broeske spends her late nights watching Jimmy Kimmel.

Poet, novelist, essayist and contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered, Andrei Codrescu is both prolific and celebrated. A professor of English at Louisiana State University, he is also the editor of the literary journal Exquisite Corpse. Romanian by birth, Codrescu has lived in and around New Orleans for more than 20 years, and his latest book, New Orleans, Mon Amour, is a collection of essays detailing his decades-long love affair with the city. The volume is particularly meaningful in light of the city’s devastation, and a percentage of the book’s proceeds will be donated to hurricane relief. Codrescu recently answered questions from BookPage about his adopted hometown and its uneasy future.

BookPage: Did this book grow out of the recent events in New Orleans or was it one you had in the back of your mind? Did you feel compelled to write it? Andrei Codrescu: I’ve been writing about New Orleans for 20 years, but it never occurred to me that the city I knew, loved and criticized, would one day cease to exist. I had no idea that I might one day not take it for granted that the character, poignancy and peculiarities of New Orleans would be unavailable to my blithe pen. After Katrina, my writings suddenly had a shape, sadly, the shape of history.

BP: In the book, you describe just how many writers live and work in New Orleans. What has been happening in that community since the hurricane? AC: Well, some of them took refuge in my Baton Rouge house. James Nolan, Jose Torres-Tama, Claudia Copeland, Jed Horne escaped from New Orleans in various dramatic ways and came to Baton Rouge. There was camaraderie, and Jimmy Nolan, a true New Orleanian, cooked five-star meals. That’s a constant of the New Orleans character: protect civilization and keep your exquisite manners even as the ship goes down. Catastrophes happen suddenly, but manners and cuisine are acquired over time, they are about permanence. Many other New Orleans writers were scattered all over the U.S., to places where they imported our story-telling, joie-de-vivre, and, possibly, drove their hosts insane with some of the local bad habits (like the occasional cigarette and the story-lubricating rum). Right now, the hardiest souls are returning: there are regular poetry readings at the Gold Mine Saloon in the French Quarter, bookstores are re-opening, books about New Orleans are feverishly written and re-issued. Every writer I know is possessed by fury and inspiration. Sadly, this time is going to be known as a golden age for New Orleans letters. I want to collect every book and scrap of paper being published now; it will all be extremely valuable to our successors. Catastrophes are always great sources of inspiration for artists because they provide seriousness, gravitas, plus endless stories.

BP: You say charm can never be used exactly the way it’s found. With that in mind, do you worry about the future of New Orleans, especially its rebuilding? AC: I worry about corporate entities like casinos and entertainment conglomerates bottling fake charm and faux-history to create a bigger tourist trap than we can imagine now. A guy in California actually wants to recreate Storyville, an ancient prostitution district without prostitutes. Now, how exactly do you do that? The charm of New Orleans was that it was never virtual, it was always a hands-on experience.

BP: You were born about as far away from the American South as one can get, and yet you have articulated exactly the feel, nature and attitude of the region and of course, of New Orleans specifically. Do you have any thoughts on how this is? AC: When I first moved to Louisiana, people asked me where I was from. When I said, Transylvania, there was a sigh of relief. At least you’re not a Yankee. I was born in Sibiu, a small town in Transylvania, Romania, that was remote and provincial, but full of magic. I knew liars, storytellers and vagabonds where I grew up. I found them again in New Orleans. The politics of Louisiana was corrupt, just like home. Everyone knew what a cop or a judge cost. When the casinos came, the scale changed. The city started on the path that I fear Katrina hastened greatly. About a decade ago, all of Transylvania moved to New Orleans thanks to Anne Rice’s vampires and the city’s Goths, which proves that you don’t need to go home again; if you’re patient, your home will come to you, fangs and all.